John Walker's Fourmilab Change Log

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Reading List: Red Thunder

In my review of
Ark (June 2012),
I wrote that one of the most time-tested forms of
science fiction was assuming a counterfactual (based
upon present knowledge and conventional wisdom) and then
spinning out the consequences which follow logically from
it. While Ark was a disappointment, this
full-on romp shows just how well the formula works
when employed by a master of the genre. First, one
must choose the counterfactual carefully. In this
case Varley vaults over the stumbling block of most
near-future science fiction and harks back to
Doc Smith's
Skylark novels by asking,
“What if propulsion were not the problem?”.

This sets the stage for the kind of story many might have
thought laughably obsolete in the 21st century: a bunch of
intrepid misfits building their own spaceship and blasting
off for Mars, beating en-route Chinese and American
expeditions, and demonstrating their world-transforming
technology in a way that no government would be able to
seize for its own benefit. The characters are not supermen,
but rather people so like those you know that they're
completely believable, and they develop in the story as they
find themselves, largely through the luck of being in the
right place at the right time, able to accomplish
extraordinary things. There are plenty of laughs along
the way, as well as the deeply moving backstory of the
characters, especially that of the semi-autistic savant
Jubal Broussard who stumbles onto the discovery that
changes everything for humanity, forever.
His cousin, disgraced ex-astronaut Travis Broussard, gets to
experience the “heady feeling to put the President on hold,
refuse an order, and hang up on her, all in the space of ten
minutes.” (p. 392)